Today was relatively quiet. I worked until the early afternoon until Hostess drove me to Zug to have a look at its festive goodies.
My day started with the discovery that my ThinkPad had taken it upon itself to display a “Detection error on HDD0” message a few minutes before my 8am lesson was due to start which was not really ideal. Hostess lent me her laptop last-minute to work from and later, I spent some time with the back off mine jiggling the cable to the hard drive in an attempt to resolve the issue which was achieved with the help of a little screwdriver, a few stern words, and some threatening behaviour.
This didn’t help with my early-morning start, but once I had that sorted and a USB stick with an emergency ChromeOS Flex installed, the day went relatively smoothly.
Zug’s Christmas lights won’t be switched on until the weekend, meaning I didn’t get to see it in all its sparkly splendour, but the tree on Landesgemeindeplatz had its lights on and looked lovely because of the simplicity of the adorning red and white lights and the surrounding white-fronted buildings.
We had a little explore and I was shown all manner of wonderful things such as the stairs that lead down to a window into the lake (an expensive use of excess budget to stop it lining another council’s pockets) and the Greth Schell statue. This is a potable fountain — all fountains in Switzerland where the water flows from pipes are potable — dedicated to Margarethe Schell, a woman who at the beginning of the 18th century felt compelled to pick up her drunken husband from the pub late at night and drag him home in a back pack. Why she accessorised with deely boppers to do this was not explained to me and will probably remain a mystery, but it appears to be a tradition carried forward to the modern carnival from the 19th century in which Greth and her worse-for-wear spouse are accompanied in a parade around the town.
On their main day, Güdelmontag, Greth dances around the streets to music, accompanied by her husband’s equally tipsyseven drinking buddies, the Lölis, a Swiss-German word for a clumsy person or fool, although I suspect Margarethe probably had her own special name for them. The job of the Lölis is officially to annoy the revellers and scare the children, who occasionally shout “Greth Schällebei!” to be rewarded with tasty treats such as sausages, mutschli cheese, and oranges. Some lucky children might also get the chance to traumatised with Süüblatere, a local word for the pig bladders which are used to hit them, although the selection criteria for this suffering appears vague.
Hostess lamented that we were not able to access the Zytturm, the clock tower that at 52 metres high is taller than the other towers in the town. The lower part was initially constructed as a simple passageway through the town’s oldest city wall, but was made taller by the builder of the church in the 15th century. There is an astronomical clock in the tower, with complications to indicate the month, phase of the moon, day of the week, and leap year. It is normally possible to access the tower through a little door at the top of a dinky staircase, after having retrieved the key from the souvenir shop at the bottom of the tower – which is incredibly trusting, if you think about it but the tower is being restored, so it wasn’t possible. Another time.
After some poking around in shops with shiny things, I was treated to an Aperol Spritz at the end of my tour. The bar was rather well-to-do, where trout pout appeared to be the prevailing lipstick trend.
